In the medical care field, data on a patient's recovery or condition is often entered by hand after performing a therapeutic function or observing various monitors and measuring devices. This data is combined into a series of data collections often without easy access to any single piece of data or a method of correlating data from different places within the collection as a whole. This lack of organization and easy access makes it difficult for health care personnel to quickly identify trends and key events in the patient's condition. Further, the prospective administration of procedures, medication or tests may also prove troublesome since this type data is not generally combined or correlated with already existing monitor data that is gathered on the patient. This monitor data, however, could in fact be a necessary precondition to performing this prospective administration of care.
Even when health care personnel store patient data on a computer, it is not adequately organized and presented with respect to the overall process of monitoring condition or recovery, which is often represented by a strip chart recording of a certain vital sign. Hence, correlating other data with a given time period on the strip chart recording often proves difficult and comparing this set of data in order to reach general conclusions, once it is correlated with similar data taken at earlier intervals, proves even more troubling. In specific areas of medical care, technology is now available to monitor several parameters of the subject's condition through a computer. However, the problem with many computer monitoring systems is the continuing inability of the user to correlate the many layers of interconnected data in a manner in which the initial broad perspective of the data is not lost. This is the problem encountered with hypermedia in which, as progressively smaller concentrations of data are viewed, the large picture becomes lost, thus leading to viewer disorientation and confusion. A system is required to retain perspective with the larger view of data while concurrently allowing the viewer to delve into the layers of hypermedia. A need thus arises in medicine as well as in many other areas of process control and monitoring of nonmedical systems, to devise a method to track and correlate various data from a variety of sources, including the computer's own internal calculations with reference to a time line or similar dimension that retains a larger and lasting perspective.